“In two of your poems you called that centralPassage of womanhood a wound,Instead of a curtain guarding a silkenTrail of sighs. How many men,Upon regarding such beauty, helplesslyTouching it, recklessly needingTo enter its warmth again and again,Have assumed it embodies their own acheOf absence, the personalGash that has punished their lives.So endowed of anatomy, any womanWho has been lovedKnows that her tenderest blushOf tissue is a luxe burden of have.Although it bleeds, this is only to cleanse,To prepare yet another nesting for love.It is not a wound, friend.It is a home for you.It is a way into the world.”

“Does the moon peer downat the tides and hunger for home?”

“The soul maintains it's deathly sleep and the heart bleeds from a thousand wounds”

“I appear at times merry and in good heart, talk, too,before others quite reasonably, and it looks as tho I felt, too, God knows how well within my skin. Yet the soul maintains its deathly sleep and the heart bleeds from a thousand wounds.”

“The beauty myth of the present is more insidious than any mystique of femininity yet: A century ago, Nora slammed the door of the doll's house; a generation ago, women turned their backs on the consumer heaven of the isolated multiapplianced home; but where women are trapped today, there is no door to slam. The contemporary ravages of the beauty backlash are destroying women physically and depleting us psychologically. If we are to free ourselves from the dead weight that has once again been made out of femaleness, it is not ballots or lobbyists or placards that women will need first; it is a new way to see.”

“What becomes of a man who acquires a beautiful woman, with her "beauty" his sole target? He sabotages himself. He has gained no friend, no ally, no mutual trust: She knows quite well why she has been chosen. He has succeeded in buying something: the esteem of other men who find such an acquisition impressive.”

“Is the beauty myth good to men? It hurts them by teaching them how to avoid loving women. It prevents men from actually seeing women. It does not, contrary to its own professed ideology, stimulate and gratify sexual longing. In suggesting a vision in place of a woman, it has a numbing effect, reducing all senses but the visual, and impairing even that.”